One of Twitter’s limitations when expanding to the global community is the fact that the microblogging network is currently only available in English and Japanese. Other social networks like Yahoo Meme have tried to capitalize on this gap by offering a Twitter-like network in Spanish and Portuguese.
Today, Twitter says it will soon be rolling out support for FIGS: French, Italian, German, and Spanish. In a blog post, the social network says that it hopes to offer Twitter in several other languages in the near future. And while Twitter is going to be doing some of the translations in-house, they are mostly trying to crowdsource translations, which is a strategy that Facebook has used in the past.
So now, Twitter will offer a tool that lets people suggest translations for the site. Once people submit translations, Twitter follow up on the technical backend. The tool will be rolled out to a small group of volunteer translators and as they come in, Twitter will distribute the translations to developers so they can offer multi-language support. Twitter adds that the crowdsourcing strategy has been the foundation for many features on the site such as @mentions and retweets. Users submit their ideas and Twitter will make them a reality. It appears that translation volunteers will be given a level, which will be indicated on their profile (see our screenshot of what this looks like below). It’s seems safe to assume that as your become more reliable with translations, you move up levels.
It’s about time that Twitter rolled out more language functionality and what better way to do this than to lean on your loyal followers to help out with this endeavor. And with versions of the site in more languages, Twitter should be able to increase its international following. It’s certainly worked with Facebook.
Now, Facebook wants to unleash its army of volunteer translators on other sites and apps across the Web. Any site or app that use Facebook Connect can now tap into the Facebook community to get help translating their site into any language that Facebook Translations supports.
Facebook recently launched a feature of Facebook Connect that lets developers tap into the Facebook community to get help translating their site into any language that Facebook Translations supports. Facebook even patented its crowdsourced translation tools.
Update: here’s the translation agreement sent out by Twitter to a subset of users. Click the image to view a larger size.
Photo credit: Flickr/lepiaf.geo
I love that they raise $100m but still want free labor from users!
I guess if they can get away with it, more power to them!
jesus, it’s ~200 sentences in total. Have they spent all their money on techcrunch?
I don’t know if it is as much about spending money but getting the backing of the crowd. If you allow your users to vote on which is the best translation, then your users can’t complain that your translation is terrible.
Didn’t Facebook do the same thing?
Thats seems like a loss.
seperate people and sorting them in díffrent lang. Will only make it harder to gain connections regardlees from your one location. Do that will make it less social and less cractive i belive.
Regards
m00ns
I am portuguese but i wont stop twittering in English, if i want to talk to my english speaking friends.. It’s not about separating the existing user’s follow base but instead to create a new mass of users that would be less likely to use it because it is not in Portuguese.
For instance Facebook is not that big there because HI5 has a huge footprint, hard to break. HI5 localized the site waaay before, and that’s why people joined.
This adds an interesting dimension to Twitter analytic work done by a few start ups. Will they or won’t they index, parse and potentially do semantic analysis of the multilingual data. First point is Language identification and then comes the point of analysis. Some solutions do exist, but it will be interesting to see how does the developer community responds. or is this the entry point for the big players to eat up the small ones?
Great idea – translate the figs. I once sent an email to a friend commenting on a fabulous meal.
I said that I had particularly enjoyed the –
prosciutto with large melons. Unfortunately spellcheck changed prosciutto to “prostitute”.
Needless to say my friend was deeply puzzled and disturbed. Sometimes we are separated by a common language. Translation is usually a good thing. Bravi.
I have actually twittered in Arabic already. When 3.0 came out for the iPhone allowing for forigen language keyboard to be used, I pulled up my Twitter app and sent a quick post in Arabic. It worked flawlesly.
I can do some tranlates to portuguese and spanish.
How do you say, “Follow @DrRandPink,The Orgasm Whisperer” in Mandarin Chinese.
Twitter can pay for their server space; they can pay for their sandwiches and coffee; they can pay for their programmers and accountants – they can pay for the work of translators, too.
I would pay to be able to have users I select translated automatically when read their tweets. I have tons of people that follow me, but I don’t follow back because I have no clue what they are saying. To have this automatic and part of Twitter would be great.
I don’t see the need for this. Using english programs and websites gives people the chanse to learn some. It’s not a bad thing.
You obviously don’t speak any other language or understand the context of those non-english speaking countries. IMHO
If you’re interested in how other companies like Adobe, EMC, HP, Intel, Kiva, Second Life, Symantec and Yahoo are implementing crowdsourcing to support global versions of their products, the Localization Industry Standards Association just published a new report. You can find details at http://www.lisa...ing.1280.0.html.
Why not? We also call you out there to translate our materials for no charge. We are paying a lot to Tomedes.com today (great service, by the way)…
We also call lawyers and accountants and any service provider to work for free.
The difference between Google and Twitter is this:
Google uses computers to help users do search.
Twitter uses users to help its computers do search.
The Google strategy is better on the short run, but the Twitter policy, like facebook, is better for long term development and user recognition.
BS.
The whole point of technology is to increase productivity. Using computers to do distributed map reduce helps users find relevant info faster.
What does Twitter accomplish? Having retards twitting real time info, which is usually just a repeat of other news sources, and feed that information manually by users into computers and call it “real time search”?
Are they just going to translation the site e.g. Profile, Settings etc.. ? In that case it does not seems to be such a large project. However if they start to translate some tweets that may not be manageable.
I can help translating into spanish and also catalan. how can I contact you?
thanks.